11 - The Lammas Feast (4 page)

When I recovered my balance, I glanced round angrily for the ill-mannered yokels who had elbowed me aside with such ferocity, and found myself looking after the retreating backs of two men who were, surprisingly, both bigger than myself. They were obviously a pair, laughing and talking together, and I hesitated for the best part of half a minute, debating the advisability of picking a quarrel with either of them. Everyone else was giving them a very wide berth. In the end, however, anger got the better of common sense, and I caught them up as they veered to their left, towards Bristol Bridge. I tapped the slightly smaller of the two on his arm.

He stopped and swung back to face me. He had a pockmarked face beneath a thatch of spiky fair hair and cold, grey eyes that at first sight appeared almost colourless. I had not been mistaken in either his girth or his height, and, close to, he appeared even larger than he had done at a distance. He must have stood well over six feet in his good leather boots, because he topped me by a couple of inches. His mate, brown-haired and brown-eyed, was perhaps half an inch taller again. Except for me, they towered above everyone around them.

‘What do you want?’ the pockmarked one demanded, but looked a little wary when he realized that I was not the average dwarf he had been expecting.

I told him. ‘You tried to knock me over back there.’

The grey eyes raked me up and down. ‘So?’ he asked insolently. ‘You must have been blocking my path.’

He was not local. His speech did not have the West Country burr – the hard ‘r’s and ugly diphthonged vowels that we in this part of the world inherited from our Saxon forebears – but he was not from up country, either. The way he spoke reminded me of my friend, Philip Lamprey, and his wife, Jean. A Londoner then, which explained the man’s cocksureness, and also that of his companion. Although neither was by any means a dandy, their clothes were good, a narrow trimming of budge decorating the hems of their tunics. (As always in this country, the latest clothing law, issued by the King only twelve months before, was being steadfastly ignored. If they could afford to, the English continued to wear whatever took their fancy.)

‘I was not blocking your path,’ I retorted, beginning to lose my temper. ‘Furthermore, I live in this city, and I take great exception to strangers pushing me aside in my own streets.’

‘Oh, you do, do you?’ snarled my opponent, his narrowed eyes showing an angry glint. One great hand shot out and gripped my throat. ‘Well, let me tell you, Chapman . . .’

‘Having problems, Roger?’ asked a voice behind me, and a moment later Burl Hodge, a tenter who lived and worked in Redcliffe, appeared at my side. He was accompanied by Jack, the elder of his sons, both their round, freckled faces puckered belligerently and two admirable pairs of fists bunched ready for a fight.

The taller of the men tapped his friend on the shoulder.

‘Let it go, Robin,’ he urged. (The name Robin had surely never been more mistakenly bestowed on anyone than on this great oaf.) ‘We’re not here to cause trouble.’ He turned to me and smiled ingratiatingly, although I could tell that the effort was cracking his face. ‘We’re sorry if we jostled you, Chapman. It was an accident. No offence was intended.’

There was nothing I could do but accept his apology. To do otherwise would have been churlish, even though I could see that the first man was hoping I would still give him an excuse for a brawl. But I stepped back, holding my hands palm upwards in a gesture of peace, and wished them both God speed.

Burl and I stood watching as the two men disappeared between the houses on the bridge.

‘Not here to cause trouble, eh?’ Burl murmured. ‘Then what
are
they here for, I wonder. I don’t like strangers who are bigger than me. And I particularly don’t like strangers who are bigger than you, Roger. That really worries me.’

‘It’s the start of Saint James’s fair in a few days’ time,’ said Jack, who was an apprentice weaver with Master Thomas Adelard. ‘Maybe they’re here in connection with that. Securing the necessary licence for a stall.’

His father cuffed him playfully around the ear. ‘I can’t see that pair doing a nice line in bric-a-brac,’ he laughed. ‘Murder and mayhem, perhaps. Pretty gewgaws for ladies, no.’

‘That’s silly,’ Jack objected. ‘They could be selling anything . . .’

‘I saw Dick this morning,’ I interrupted in order to prevent what I could see was going to be a pointless argument. ‘He seems to have settled in well at the bakery.’

Burl nodded. ‘John Overbecks is a good man and a kind master.
She
’s a bit queer, but Dick says if you don’t say too much to her and leave her alone, she won’t bother you. Says Master Overbecks adores her.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, each one to his own taste! I’d rather have a bright, cheerful woman like my Jenny any day. And now I must get back to work. The cloth dries so fast this weather, and if it’s too dry, it won’t stretch between the tenter hooks. Time you were off, too, young Jack.’ He clapped me on the back as a sign of farewell, and strode off in the direction of the tenting field.

‘I’m on an errand for Master Adelard,’ Jack said, ‘so I’ll come with you as far as the bakery and say hello to Dick.’ He brightened. ‘We might overtake those two bravos.’

‘I wouldn’t try renewing acquaintance with that couple,’ I advised him. Some lads have no nose for danger.

We crossed the bridge and walked together up High Street until my companion said goodbye and joined the crowd of people milling round John Overbecks’s counter, calling out a greeting to his brother, who was serving. On the spur of the moment, I decided to walk along Saint Mary le Port Street and work my way round to the castle.

I had actually passed the church when I stopped and then retraced my last few steps. Something moved inside the porch as two substantial shadows retreated even further into the blackness. After a moment’s hesitation, I shrugged and went on my way, whistling tunelessly – as I have said in previous chronicles, I have absolutely no ear for music – as though I had seen nothing, and was mistaken in thinking that I ever had. But as I reached the far end of the alleyway, I looked back over my shoulder. A head was craning round the side of the church porch, its owner staring in the direction of John Overbecks’s bakery.

I
mmediately, I thought of Master Overbecks’s story about his wife and sister-in-law; how they had fled from their home on Exmoor, and Marion’s fear that they might be pursued. But after due consideration, I dismissed it from my mind.

Coincidences do happen. Of course they do, or there wouldn’t be a word for them. But I simply could not believe that, after a lapse of five years, two men would turn up looking for the Baldock sisters on the very day that I heard the story for the first time. That, surely, was stretching the limits of credulity too far.

Nevertheless, my pair of ruffians did appear to be watching the bakery, but for what reason I was unable to guess. I had just made up my mind to return as far as Saint Mary’s Church and have a word with them, when someone clapped me on the shoulder. Turning, I found myself face to face with Richard Manifold.

Apart from being a former admirer of my wife’s – in the days before she married her first husband and went to live in Hereford – Richard Manifold was also a sheriff’s officer, now promoted to sergeant. During the early days of our acquaintance, after Adela was widowed and returned to Bristol, I had thoroughly disliked him; but I later accepted that this had been because, without realizing it, I was falling in love with Adela myself. Unconsciously I had known that he was a rival for her favours, desperately trying to rekindle her former spark of affection for him. That she had bestowed her love on me – when I had eventually come to my senses and stopped lusting after the blonde beauty of whom I had thought myself enamoured – was totally undeserved, a fact of which Richard Manifold and I were both well aware, and which I suspected he still resented. Nowadays, however, there was a kind of armed truce between us. If he visited the cottage in Lewin’s Mead and I was there, I gritted my teeth and smiled politely while he and Adela recalled their childhood and early youth in Bristol. (I was born and grew up in Wells and therefore had no share in these reminiscences.) In return, he was equally polite to me and treated me, superficially at least, as a friend.

The bright blue eyes were certainly friendly now, as they regarded me curiously from beneath a pair of jutting eyebrows, the same dark red as his hair. Behind him stood his two lieutenants, Jack Gload and Peter Littleman, both smallish, dark men, showing definite traces of the Welsh blood which, in most Bristolians, mingles with that of the English. Constant seaborne traffic, to and fro across the Bristol Channel, has resulted in a good deal of intermarriage between the two races.

‘What’s caught your attention, Chapman, that you’re blocking the path, oblivious to all the poor folk trying to get past you?’

Richard Manifold, as he always did when speaking to me, drew himself up to his full height, even lifting his heels a little way off the ground. But he still only reached to an inch or so above my shoulders.

‘Ah! Sergeant!’ I nodded towards Saint Mary le Port Church. ‘There are a couple of bravos hiding in the porch who seem to be watching Master Overbecks’s bakery.’ And I gave him a brief account of my morning’s encounter with the pockmarked man and his companion. ‘I was wondering what they might be up to.’

Richard Manifold smiled condescendingly and winked at his two henchmen, a wink that I was sure I was meant to see. This idiot, it said, thinks he can do our job for us.

‘Well, well! It doesn’t sound to me as though they’ve done anything very serious. Not yet, at any rate. But I tell you what, Roger. Just to set your mind at rest –’ another wink – ‘my men and I will go and have a word with them. Meantime, you can get on about your business. You need to, I daresay, now that you’ve yet another mouth to feed.’ He spoke with all the carefree nonchalance of the confirmed bachelor. ‘A boy, I hear. Give Adela my best wishes and congratulations. I’ll call on you both later today, at the cottage, and let you know what I discover. Jack! Peter! Follow me!’

I silently cursed my own stupidity, although I could not really have foreseen that I was presenting Richard Manifold with an excuse to invade my home for the evening. He would be there until the curfew bell, which rang later in summer, monopolizing Adela’s attention, disturbing the children with his loud voice and unrestrained gusts of laughter, sitting in one of our two good chairs and leaving me the discomfort of our rickety stool.

But there was nothing I could do to retrieve the situation, so I forced a smile and told him that he would be welcome, crossing my fingers, schoolboy fashion, as I did so. Then I went reluctantly on my way, dragging my feet and glancing back over my shoulder until the sergeant and his officers disappeared into the church porch to question the two strangers. I loitered on the corner of Saint Mary le Port Street for a while, expecting all five men to reappear very shortly; but when, after several minutes, there was no sign of them, I decided that I could hang around no longer. Richard Manifold was right: with a growing family to provide for, I needed to earn a crust or two in order to put food on the table, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs – particularly if I were to keep my hidden hoard a secret.

By four o’clock, I was on my way home to supper. The heavy July heat coupled with the noise and the crowds (two factors that normally did not worry me) were beginning to make me bad-tempered. My feet, sweltering inside my boots, were aching unbearably. I had removed my tunic and was wearing only my breeches and shirt, but the sweat still coursed down my back in rivulets. My fair hair had turned several shades darker and was plastered to my head. My shirt clung damply to my body.

In the last few hours, I had tramped all over the city to very little purpose. With the start of Saint James’s Fair only days away, no one wanted to waste his or her money on purchases from a chapman’s pack when traders would soon be arriving with their goods from all around the country, from every part of Wales and even from abroad. (As I trudged along Welsh Back a few minutes earlier, I had noticed at least two of the flat-bottomed barges the Welsh call trows tied up at the wharfside.)

For the second time that day, I was walking up High Street. At that hour of the afternoon, the drain in the middle of the road had become blocked with refuse and stank to high heaven. Again, this was something I did not usually notice, but which now, irritable and tired as I was, offended my senses. I was feeling extremely sorry for myself, and I could just picture Adela’s wry smile as I staggered into the cottage wanting to be petted and cosseted and told what a brave young fellow I was to be working in all this heat.

As I once more drew abreast of Saint Mary le Port Street, I glanced across the road to Master Overbecks’s bakery. There seemed to be nothing amiss. Women were still crowding round the counter, and both Master Overbecks and Dick Hodge were serving them pies and cakes and pastries. I wondered what had happened concerning the two strangers, and would have gone across to enquire, but business was so brisk that I decided against it. The baker wouldn’t thank me for the interruption: I should just have to wait for news until Richard Manifold called on us, as he had promised, that evening.

A yard or so further on, to my left, was Jasper Fairbrother’s bakery. He had already ceased trading for the day, the counter drawn up, the shop shuttered. This did not surprise me. Jasper had so many other irons in the fire – gambling, extortion, whoring and having innocent citizens beaten up – that it was a constant source of wonder to his fellow inhabitants that he found time to run a bakery at all. I think most people secretly hoped that he would one day be caught selling underweight loaves, and be dragged through the streets with the offending bread hung round his neck, a target for all the stinking rubbish that could be thrown at him. Unfortunately, if he did give short measure, or flout the city ordinance regarding the hucksters, he got away with it. His victims were too frightened of him and his bravos to complain.